Winter days

We've tried our best to enjoy the snowy winter weather here the past weeks.  Snowshoeing, hiking, daily skating or sledding, snow fort building, and outdoor play in our twig house.  Yesterday our daughter discovered the toboggan can be used for hauling firewood, and much larger loads than can be carried by the armful.  We all love cozy fires in the evening, especially when we settle in for some board games like our latest favourite Bird Bingo (available from our awesome local independent bookstore Wordsworth Books), Wildcraft (how could I resist a board game that teaches players to use medicinal herbs), and lots of the classic Uno.

Strawbale update - final renos for 2009 done

With our last push before winter, we finished up the final renovations on the strawbale additition including soffits and fascia, eaves troughs, building the fence across our driveway, and installing a woodstove! The last bit for December is to build a wooden deck along the back of the addition (the hens like to roost here, and it will help keep snow off the plaster walls - for next year it will provide the nicest view of the pond and garden and will be prime relaxing space with a bench or hammock!). For next year...living roof, front porch, landscaping, more fruit trees on new driveway garden space...etc (lots of time over the winter to dream about all of this).

After some debate, the woodstove we chose to heat the strawbale space was a tiny Jotul. These stoves have been made in Norway since the 1890s and come with a great reputation. The one we have is the smallest model as we really only need to heat about 600 square feet with it - our living room and bedroom in the strawbale addition. The clincher was that it has a cookplate, so we can always have a kettle on for tea, or a pot of soup warming...Typing here with a little fire warming my back, I know this was the right decision. It was a little chilly with no external heat in this addition last winter - though extra socks, slippers, sweaters and quilts did go a long way to providing comfort. Now the room is really cozy and feels festive with faint smell of woodsmoke in the air.

Late October garden tasks

We're looking forward to the winter months, where we take time to reflect, read, research and plan for next season's activities. One point that I took from Vandana Shiva's presentation at the university last week was the imperative to link ecological food production, poverty reduction, and climate change together - any solutions or actions we come up with should be addressing all three areas to be truly effective and sustainable. I hope to delve more into this topic through her latest book, Soil not Oil, this winter. Also, included on the ever expanding reading list are Arundrati Roy's Living with Grasshoppers, Novella Carpenter's urban farming book, a SPIN-Farming manual, and Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook, as well as a few crafting books like the Handmade Home (I plan to keep my basket of sewing right near the woodstove, so I take real time to settle down and work on some projects each day). By the way, yes, we did finally take the plunge and decide on a woodstove - a small Jotul model - it has arrived and is awaiting installation. More on this in another post when we install it, light the first fire, warm a pot of soup on the cookplate and take a few photos...

For fall wrap up we are now pretty much done in the yard and garden. Seeds collected, vines pulled out, mulch spread, compost turned, winter greens planted...The garlic still needs to be planted, and as we are planning on reworking out garden layout for next year (putting in smaller 30-inch wide beds, instead of 48-inch as we now have them, and narrower paths - all to maximize our growing potential), I have yet to measure out where to plant garlic so it will be in a proper bed next season. The coldframe has been planted with greens, spinach, chard, herbs, chicory, and mizuna, and the plastic cover is reinstalled to keep the bed warm on sunny winter days. We need to transplant some flats of seedlings into the greenhouse beds (various lettuces for winter consumption) and then we're ready for winter.